All we need to do is make it a priority to actually teach students in school how to get along and respect each other.

Carol Todd holds a photograph of her late daughter, Amanda Todd, on a bench dedicated to the teen in Port Coquitlam, B.C. Amanda took her own life at the age of 15 on Oct. 10, 2012, after repeated bullying.

By:Calvin White Published on Sun Oct 20 2013

Rebecca Ann Sedwick, 12 years old, from Florida, and Bart Palosz, 15, from Connecticut, both died this past month — Rebecca from jumping to her death, Bart by shooting himself. Nothing draws media attention quicker than tragedy or scandal.

The April suicide of 17-year-old Rehtaeh Parsons, from Dartmouth, N.S., and half a year before that, the hanging death of Amanda Todd, 15, of Port Coquitlam, B.C., were two of Canada’s most recent, widely known suicide deaths of young people. The tragedy is obvious, but it’s important to recognize that it’s a scandal as well.

The scandal is this: these kids were driven to suicide because of bullying. In every such case, there is news commentary, quotes from experts and educators, tearful pleas from parents and commitment from school districts to enact anti-bullying programs. Government leaders chime in. We wring our hands over what to do about this problem that grows trickier as digital technologies increasingly enable it. All talk. All forgotten as soon as our attention is drawn elsewhere. And so the tragic cycle continues.

It’s not that we’re completely ignoring the problem. Brochures selling anti-bullying DVDs, manuals and curriculum units are distributed to every school in Canada. Speakers are available to “train” teachers how to make their schools bully-free zones. But these are piecemeal responses.

We have the tools we need to eliminate bullying in our schools and massively counteract it outside of them. We’re just not using them.

All we need to do is make it a priority to actually teach kids, just as we teach them math and English, how to get along and respect each other. Values need to be taught. Self-awareness, resourcefulness, creativity and self-care need to be taught. Rights need to be taught. This should be done from the first day of kindergarten to high school graduation.

I asked a Grade 12 English class what they would do if any of them was the principal of a school in which a student committed suicide due to bullying. A 17-year-old boy blurted out, “Close the school!” Of course, if we closed every school in which bullying is a problem we would have nowhere left to educate our children. But the student understood something that most Canadian educators do not: that the problem of bullying requires a drastic response, not just more words.

We need to establish in Canadian schools an anti-bullying curriculum that challenges the ideas that underpin the epidemic. We are too often taught to see bullies as stronger than victims. A person who allows himself to be pushed around or who doesn’t fight back is too often dismissed as weak. Too often, the advice is “stand up for yourself” or “learn to fight your own battles.”

Once the bullying grows bad enough, we help the victim change classes or schools, or we consider home schooling. This only gives our bullied children the sense that they have failed to get along, that they are the problem. Why else would they have been removed while the bully gets to carry on as if nothing had happened?

Rather than conceding defeat to bullies, we need to expose the psychological roots of that behaviour. We need to teach our kids how bullies get made, what goes on inside someone when they are bullying. We have posters in our schools telling students to “Say no to bullying!” They are a waste of paper. They should say, “Of course I’m afraid. Why wouldn’t I be afraid of someone who has been hurt and now wants to hurt?”

If bullies better understood what leads them to act out and why that’s wrong, they might be less likely to bully. If the bullied better understood bullies’ motives, they might be less likely to see being picked on as a reflection of their self-worth. An anti-bullying curriculum would provide students with the psychological tools they need to avoid becoming the next tragedy.

We know we can teach kids how to do physics or play an instrument. We spend years doing just that. What’s the holdup when it comes to teaching something that will ease suffering and save lives?

Calvin White is a former high school counselor of 20 years and author of The Secret Life of Teenagers (The Key Publishing Company).

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